Under the Bridge 6
NARUTO FIC
Title: Under the Bridge -- Chapter Six UTB chapters in Five minutes or less
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG - 13
Disclaimer: Naruto isn't mine. All resemblance to peoples real and fictional on the part of the OCs is completely accidental.
Warnings: Sue!Fic, AU
Summary: Suzubashi Kameko, genin of Otogakure, takes a teammate up on a dare. Little does she know that this dare will change her life completely.
Chapters: One Two Three Four Five
Chapter Six : Attack
Kameko padded along behind the group, her eyes fixed on the edge of the lake they were currently following. Apparently, their mission was to escort some man named Matsushita across the Fire county. He was a rather large man, attended to by his sons, a daughter, and a small group of guards that the Konoha nin were currently henged as. According to him, he’d been bothered by nin, which was why his forces were so small.
You’d think his forces would be gone, Kameko thought idly to herself, turning to look up at him. Matsushita, his family, and their guards had been shown what the others and herself looked like unhenged so that if a fight ensued, the guards wouldn’t accidentally take one of them to be the enemy nin.
Her meeting with her temporary teammates could have went better, she reflected, a subconscious thought noting how chaotic her mind was at the moment and expressing concern. Sasuke had been downright hostile, and no words from any of his teammates could sooth him. For a split second, she was terrified that he recognized her, even though she'd never seen him before. She'd heard from Naruto about the Sasuke-Scene those years back, and it chilled her to the bone when she thought he might have recognized her as a Sound-nin. Sakura had been polite, but also cold, obviously distressed over how Sasuke was acting. Doubtlessly, she'd been thinking about how they wouldn't have this problem if Kameko hadn't been there.
She couldn't fit into a tight-knit group, she realized. She hadn't been consciously entertaining such thoughts, but it was obvious that she had been unconsciously. It had been Naruto's easy and accepting attitude that had fooled her doubtlessly.
On her next glance about, she estimated that they'd traveled several miles already. That was odd, she mused. Should a man of the girth that he was, and with daughters as delicate as they seemed be able to cover this much land this easily?
A flash, a muffled boom, and smoke exploded. Kameko jerked her hitai-ate -- henged to look like a normal scarf -- over her nose, and crouched down.
There was a muffled cry in the smoke, a blast of light dulled in the smoke. A shock wave hit her, and her world went upside down. For a frightening moment, it felt like being ripped in half, or maybe like a small tree was being shoved through her ribcage, with a roaring inside her ears, a fuzzy whiteness in her eyes, and a sucking emptiness in her lungs. Then it was like a second shock, as she hit the ground, and the scream ripped itself from her mouth.
A sharp pain ran up her shoulder -- it felt like someone had stepped on her. She twisted, throwing them off, and started a half-blind scramble across the ground, trying to get away from the confused guards. As sound slowly filtered back into her ears, she heard fighting, and yelling. She knew at this point that if she tried to assist, she would only put herself and her teammates in danger, so she continued her retreat.
A chill hit her back, and she rolled quickly to the side. Time slowed down as her head came around before the rest of her, and she came face to face with her assailant.
One of the guards, cold dark eyes staring almost hatefully at her, his weapon only barely being lifted for another strike.
The rest of her body followed her head, and she struck out with her feet, tangling them in his legs and knocking him to the ground.
The thought echoed dully. A man that she was supposed to be protecting was attacking her. Now on her back, she could see through the thinning smoke -- their attackers where there, dressed in nin clothing, but with no distinguishing marks to betray their county or village.
Missing-nin?
She crab-walked backwards as the guard that attacked her rose to his feet, but he was quickly engaged with one of the unmarked nin, and distracted.
Her stomach felt oddly hot and tender.
She ignored this, climbing to her feet, still shaky and impaired from the blast. What had that been? It hadn't seemed like a normal explosion ...
Shaking her head in an attempt to clear it, she reached for her kunai, wondering if she was in good enough shape to be accurate with them. Shortly, she decided she wasn't, and then suddenly, the fight was over.
The man and his children seemed irritate, but calm otherwise. "Hmmm, very disturbing that you could be taken by surprise, Konoha nin," Matsushita said, frowning. Kameko noticed that only Kakashi and herself were unhenged.
Kakashi gifted him with a particularly unimpressed stare. "If that's how you see it," he said. "Since you have no wounded, let us continue."
Kameko couldn't help but frown. That was an oddly cold exchange. She decided to worry about it when her head wasn't ringing and she didn't feel like she could still fall over. She quickly formed the henge seals, but then hissed and bit her lip as it sent ripples of pain through her. No chakra use then. What could throw off chakra use?
A jutsu, of course, she realized. That boy with the scary eyes had used a technique to disable her chakra -- why couldn't someone design a jutsu specifically for the same purpose?
She wanted desperately to talk to either Naruto or Kakashi about this, but she knew better than to try in front of that man and his guards. And the guard that had tried to kill her.
She trailed along after them, noting that Kakashi hadn't henged back either. She rubbed slightly at her stomach. It was oddly uncomfortable, and she wondered how a chakra disrupting jutsu would effect the Sune-Kosuri.
They had made it maybe another five miles before Kameko finally realized that something was really wrong. She was getting light-headed, her stomach felt tight, and when she pushed at it slightly, it was hard. A tremor of fear rushed through her as she recognized finally what was wrong -- somehow, she'd managed to get internal trauma, and was hemorrhaging. It had to be a slow bleed for her to still be alive, she noted, and glanced around. She had to get it treated, but who should she tell?
Not Naruto, he was too likely to get frantic. She didn't know Sakura very well, and she didn't dare to approach Sasuke, seeing how hostile he was, which left her with one choice -- Kakashi. She didn't trust herself to get to him unnoticed, so instead settled for staring at him intently, hoping that it would cue his curiosity and not pass it off as his temporary subordinate being weird.
She was barely aware that he'd glanced her way before he made his way to her side. She stared at him blankly for a second, his presence remaining unregistered for a moment. She swallowed absently, and pressed a little harder on her stomach.
He shortly reached out and brushed her hand aside, gently pressing before he turned and made his way to one of the guards. A few words were exchanged, and then the guard made his way over to Kameko. She experienced a flash of detached fear, followed by bemusement as the guard proceeded to shoulder her to the side until they'd dropped out of the group and were being left behind. A puff later, it was Sakura standing before her.
"Let me see your stomach," she said without ceremony.
Kameko thought vague thoughts of the difficulty of her clothing before moving so that her back was to the exciting group, and pulled her shirt up to her neck. She undid the catches on the back of her body-suit until she was able to pull down the front. Her only modesty was her shirt hanging over her chest. One look down, and she vaguely noticed that her skin had turned an ugly purple, and that luckily, her suit hadn't come down far enough to reveal the circle of kanji tattooed into her flesh.
Sakura hissed in sympathy. "Internal bleeding alright. Luckily, it looks like none of your organs have been ruptured." She knelt and placed her hands on Kameko's torso, focusing. "Right, no rupturing. Just bleeding. Hold still -- you don't want this to go wrong."
Some minutes and a few jutsu that seemed to include inserting several needles into Kameko later, Sakura stood and dusted her hands off. "There you go, that should work. The bruising should heal on its own. You okay?"
"I think so," Kameko said. "I didn't know it was that bad."
"How could you not know?" Sakura demanded, looking baffled. "It had to have been some hit to cause that kind of damage!"
"I wasn't hit, though," she answered quietly, frowning. "The jutsu was the only thing that hit me. I still can't henge."
"Oh? Kakashi did say something about your chakra behaving strangely--"
Kameko paled dramatically. Kakashi could detect chakra movement? Could he tell that she had a Sune-Kosuri sealed inside her?
"Whoa, are you okay?" Sakura asked, grabbing her elbows as if she expected Kameko to fall. "You don't look so good," she added, frowning as she proceeded to check her out with one hand. "You aren't going into shock, are you? Its okay, the fight's over."
"No, no," Kameko said, withdrawing slightly and slipping her body suit back up, having to struggle for a moment to get her fingers through the proper holes at the end of her sleeves. "I'm fine, just a little ... um, tired."
Sakura eyed her doubtfully for a moment. "If you say so. Come on, we have to catch up to the others."
"You can go ahead," she answered, slipping the shirt back on. "I'll slow you down."
"A medic-nin never leaves a patient she is not sure is completely healed behind, and besides, we were already attacked once, so who's to say we won't be again?" Sakura was quick to say, frowning.
Kameko bit her lip as she followed. She was still a little dizzy, and her hearing wasn't the best even an hour and a half later, but she willing stumbled after Sakura. She'd do her best not to hold her teammates back this time.
I wish I could do that healing-chakra thing, she thought to herself as she and Sakura walked side-by-side. I haven't got the chakra control, though. If I did, I could help people. "Was it hard, learning how to be a medic-nin?" Kameko asked.
"Oh, was it ever!" Sakura breathed, eyes wide with remembered struggles. "But I was determined. I didn't want to be just Sakura anymore. I wanted to be useful."
I've never felt that way. "You seem really good at it," she answered. She'd never been healed by a medic-nin before, but it had been a fairly interesting experience.
Sakura smiled for her efforts, though. "I try," she said. "I was taught by Tsunade, and she can be really tough on you if you don't try your best."
"The best kind of teacher," Kameko said, musing. She'd learned more under Iruka's intolerant reign than she had under Tanaka's half-hearted guidance. "We're really far behind," she added, noting that the group wasn't anywhere to be seen on the road.
"I know the way, so it's okay. Its more important not to push you -- even with my healing, you should be resting."
Kameko sighed, shaking her head. "On my first mission, and I'm already hindering the group," she said wryly.
"Don't feel bad -- you just became a genin a day ago, and I think this is definitely a job for a more experienced team. Something odd is going on with those guards. We should wait to talk about it, though."
"Mm'kay," she sighed. She was starting to feel extremely tired.
--
They ended up only catching up to the group when they made it to the village with the inn. Sakura bullied Kameko into bed and made her drink tea and eat a rice mush. Kameko was red-faced with horrified embarrassment before Sakura was finished pestering her.
"Kakashi-san?" she called, frowning slightly as she ate the gruel. She didn't know what else to call him, as she wasn't her teacher.
"Hmm?" he hummed, nose buried in his orange book. Kameko had already been informed by Naruto that it was a no-good dirty pervert's book.
"Kakashi-san," she repeated for good measure. "One of the guards -- he was aiming for me."
"Oh?” Kakashi said with that same bland disinterest. "Is that so?"
She frowned. She never knew when he was sounding that way because he already knew or if he didn’t believe her. “I know when people aim at me,” she insisted. It had been part of her training, after all, since Kanaye had always seemed so intent on killing her. “There was no way he was trying to get someone behind me. It wasn’t a panicked swing either -- that was on purpose.”
“Hn. Okay.”
Kameko stared at him for a moment longer before she returned sulkily to her rice-gruel. Sasuke was brooding in a corner, eyes fixed on the window while Naruto was bugging Sakura. Kameko ate as much of the slop as she could endure before she set is aside and the bowl was swept away by Sakura. “Hey," she called to Naruto, and was gratified when he ambled over. "Did he hear me? I mean -- Hear-me-hear-me?" she asked, referring to Kakashi.
Naruto grinned at her. “Kakashi-sensei is creepy, but he‘s a good nin. He probably saw it, Kameko-chan.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, feeling embarrassed. Well, that explained his boredom with her. She paused for a moment. “I don’t like what that means,” she said.
“Eh? But having a good nin as leader is a really good idea!” Naruto exclaimed, blinking at her.
“I mean that guard,” she said. “He was trying for me. Did any of you get attacked?”
“You and Kakashi-sensei were the only ones who got hit by that jutsu,” he said, shrugging.. There was a pause as the door opened and Sakura came in. “You were the only ones that looked like you should.”
“If the guards were going after us,” Sakura said, piping up. “They wouldn’t be able to know which guards were us.”
“Hey, what did that jutsu do to you, anyway?” Naruto asked, frowning until his eyes scrunched shut and gave him a strange appearance.
Kameko shrugged. “It felt weird. I got all nauseous and then vertigo started in. It didn’t last long, and there didn’t seem to be any after affects beyond mild hemorrhaging, but the henge was completely destroyed." She paused for a moment. “Of course, it wasn’t a direct hit. I’d hate to see what a direct hit could do,” she said, idly rubbing her stomach. She didn’t know what kind of affect it would have on her if the Sune-Kosuri was released. The poor spirit would probably be ecstatic to be free and take off to torment some people, but where that would leave her was distressing. The most common way to unseal demons was to destroy the container.
"Mild hemorrhaging," Sakura echoed with a deceptively mild voice. "Kameko-chan, that mild hemorrhaging would have killed you in another fifteen minutes."
She paled to hear that, and there was mild confusion as Naruto decided that was ample reason to have another fit of dramatics. "I didn't know it was that bad," she insisted. "It wasn't a direct hit."
"Hmm, I was closer to the detonation spot than Kameko was," Kakashi put in, though it seemed like he was remarking about the weather for all the emotion he put in it.
"Why would it affect her more than it affected you?" Sakura wondered.
"That's what I want to know!" Naruto said, pouting. "What did Kakashi do that disabled it? If we could find a counter-measure this quickly --"
"It won't work like that," Sasuke's bitter voice cut in. "Kakashi's chakra was just as chaotic as hers."
Though differently, went unsaid, but Kameko heard it. Sasuke had been able to note her chakra. She felt a chill. Sasuke had noticed, and Kakashi had noticed, and what else was there left to her? She'd never been shunned or really treated much different for her demon, but it wasn't something she wanted people she didn't know to find out about. There was no way she could know how they'd react. She'd learned after one incident from a missing-nin that had come to join them that letting it be known about the Sune-Kosuri could be the last thing she wanted to do.
"Eeeeh? Well, then, what now?" Naruto demanded.
"Now we continue the mission and report to Tsunade after it's over," Kakashi said, and turned a page in his book.
Kameko almost brought up the fact of the guard again, a little angry that he'd dismissed both it and what it could mean. When her eyes focused on him, though, she stopped. Kakashi is smart -- he knows things, she reminded herself. He is the mission leader, and he knows what he's doing. So instead, she leaned back into the bed and folded her hands across her lap, closing her eyes.
She wasn't sure if she would be able to sleep.
-- To Be Continued --
No informationing because I am lazy, and I don't think anything in this chapter requires it.
Title: Under the Bridge -- Chapter Six UTB chapters in Five minutes or less
Genre: Drama
Rating: PG - 13
Disclaimer: Naruto isn't mine. All resemblance to peoples real and fictional on the part of the OCs is completely accidental.
Warnings: Sue!Fic, AU
Summary: Suzubashi Kameko, genin of Otogakure, takes a teammate up on a dare. Little does she know that this dare will change her life completely.
Chapters: One Two Three Four Five
Chapter Six : Attack
Kameko padded along behind the group, her eyes fixed on the edge of the lake they were currently following. Apparently, their mission was to escort some man named Matsushita across the Fire county. He was a rather large man, attended to by his sons, a daughter, and a small group of guards that the Konoha nin were currently henged as. According to him, he’d been bothered by nin, which was why his forces were so small.
You’d think his forces would be gone, Kameko thought idly to herself, turning to look up at him. Matsushita, his family, and their guards had been shown what the others and herself looked like unhenged so that if a fight ensued, the guards wouldn’t accidentally take one of them to be the enemy nin.
Her meeting with her temporary teammates could have went better, she reflected, a subconscious thought noting how chaotic her mind was at the moment and expressing concern. Sasuke had been downright hostile, and no words from any of his teammates could sooth him. For a split second, she was terrified that he recognized her, even though she'd never seen him before. She'd heard from Naruto about the Sasuke-Scene those years back, and it chilled her to the bone when she thought he might have recognized her as a Sound-nin. Sakura had been polite, but also cold, obviously distressed over how Sasuke was acting. Doubtlessly, she'd been thinking about how they wouldn't have this problem if Kameko hadn't been there.
She couldn't fit into a tight-knit group, she realized. She hadn't been consciously entertaining such thoughts, but it was obvious that she had been unconsciously. It had been Naruto's easy and accepting attitude that had fooled her doubtlessly.
On her next glance about, she estimated that they'd traveled several miles already. That was odd, she mused. Should a man of the girth that he was, and with daughters as delicate as they seemed be able to cover this much land this easily?
A flash, a muffled boom, and smoke exploded. Kameko jerked her hitai-ate -- henged to look like a normal scarf -- over her nose, and crouched down.
There was a muffled cry in the smoke, a blast of light dulled in the smoke. A shock wave hit her, and her world went upside down. For a frightening moment, it felt like being ripped in half, or maybe like a small tree was being shoved through her ribcage, with a roaring inside her ears, a fuzzy whiteness in her eyes, and a sucking emptiness in her lungs. Then it was like a second shock, as she hit the ground, and the scream ripped itself from her mouth.
A sharp pain ran up her shoulder -- it felt like someone had stepped on her. She twisted, throwing them off, and started a half-blind scramble across the ground, trying to get away from the confused guards. As sound slowly filtered back into her ears, she heard fighting, and yelling. She knew at this point that if she tried to assist, she would only put herself and her teammates in danger, so she continued her retreat.
A chill hit her back, and she rolled quickly to the side. Time slowed down as her head came around before the rest of her, and she came face to face with her assailant.
One of the guards, cold dark eyes staring almost hatefully at her, his weapon only barely being lifted for another strike.
The rest of her body followed her head, and she struck out with her feet, tangling them in his legs and knocking him to the ground.
The thought echoed dully. A man that she was supposed to be protecting was attacking her. Now on her back, she could see through the thinning smoke -- their attackers where there, dressed in nin clothing, but with no distinguishing marks to betray their county or village.
Missing-nin?
She crab-walked backwards as the guard that attacked her rose to his feet, but he was quickly engaged with one of the unmarked nin, and distracted.
Her stomach felt oddly hot and tender.
She ignored this, climbing to her feet, still shaky and impaired from the blast. What had that been? It hadn't seemed like a normal explosion ...
Shaking her head in an attempt to clear it, she reached for her kunai, wondering if she was in good enough shape to be accurate with them. Shortly, she decided she wasn't, and then suddenly, the fight was over.
The man and his children seemed irritate, but calm otherwise. "Hmmm, very disturbing that you could be taken by surprise, Konoha nin," Matsushita said, frowning. Kameko noticed that only Kakashi and herself were unhenged.
Kakashi gifted him with a particularly unimpressed stare. "If that's how you see it," he said. "Since you have no wounded, let us continue."
Kameko couldn't help but frown. That was an oddly cold exchange. She decided to worry about it when her head wasn't ringing and she didn't feel like she could still fall over. She quickly formed the henge seals, but then hissed and bit her lip as it sent ripples of pain through her. No chakra use then. What could throw off chakra use?
A jutsu, of course, she realized. That boy with the scary eyes had used a technique to disable her chakra -- why couldn't someone design a jutsu specifically for the same purpose?
She wanted desperately to talk to either Naruto or Kakashi about this, but she knew better than to try in front of that man and his guards. And the guard that had tried to kill her.
She trailed along after them, noting that Kakashi hadn't henged back either. She rubbed slightly at her stomach. It was oddly uncomfortable, and she wondered how a chakra disrupting jutsu would effect the Sune-Kosuri.
They had made it maybe another five miles before Kameko finally realized that something was really wrong. She was getting light-headed, her stomach felt tight, and when she pushed at it slightly, it was hard. A tremor of fear rushed through her as she recognized finally what was wrong -- somehow, she'd managed to get internal trauma, and was hemorrhaging. It had to be a slow bleed for her to still be alive, she noted, and glanced around. She had to get it treated, but who should she tell?
Not Naruto, he was too likely to get frantic. She didn't know Sakura very well, and she didn't dare to approach Sasuke, seeing how hostile he was, which left her with one choice -- Kakashi. She didn't trust herself to get to him unnoticed, so instead settled for staring at him intently, hoping that it would cue his curiosity and not pass it off as his temporary subordinate being weird.
She was barely aware that he'd glanced her way before he made his way to her side. She stared at him blankly for a second, his presence remaining unregistered for a moment. She swallowed absently, and pressed a little harder on her stomach.
He shortly reached out and brushed her hand aside, gently pressing before he turned and made his way to one of the guards. A few words were exchanged, and then the guard made his way over to Kameko. She experienced a flash of detached fear, followed by bemusement as the guard proceeded to shoulder her to the side until they'd dropped out of the group and were being left behind. A puff later, it was Sakura standing before her.
"Let me see your stomach," she said without ceremony.
Kameko thought vague thoughts of the difficulty of her clothing before moving so that her back was to the exciting group, and pulled her shirt up to her neck. She undid the catches on the back of her body-suit until she was able to pull down the front. Her only modesty was her shirt hanging over her chest. One look down, and she vaguely noticed that her skin had turned an ugly purple, and that luckily, her suit hadn't come down far enough to reveal the circle of kanji tattooed into her flesh.
Sakura hissed in sympathy. "Internal bleeding alright. Luckily, it looks like none of your organs have been ruptured." She knelt and placed her hands on Kameko's torso, focusing. "Right, no rupturing. Just bleeding. Hold still -- you don't want this to go wrong."
Some minutes and a few jutsu that seemed to include inserting several needles into Kameko later, Sakura stood and dusted her hands off. "There you go, that should work. The bruising should heal on its own. You okay?"
"I think so," Kameko said. "I didn't know it was that bad."
"How could you not know?" Sakura demanded, looking baffled. "It had to have been some hit to cause that kind of damage!"
"I wasn't hit, though," she answered quietly, frowning. "The jutsu was the only thing that hit me. I still can't henge."
"Oh? Kakashi did say something about your chakra behaving strangely--"
Kameko paled dramatically. Kakashi could detect chakra movement? Could he tell that she had a Sune-Kosuri sealed inside her?
"Whoa, are you okay?" Sakura asked, grabbing her elbows as if she expected Kameko to fall. "You don't look so good," she added, frowning as she proceeded to check her out with one hand. "You aren't going into shock, are you? Its okay, the fight's over."
"No, no," Kameko said, withdrawing slightly and slipping her body suit back up, having to struggle for a moment to get her fingers through the proper holes at the end of her sleeves. "I'm fine, just a little ... um, tired."
Sakura eyed her doubtfully for a moment. "If you say so. Come on, we have to catch up to the others."
"You can go ahead," she answered, slipping the shirt back on. "I'll slow you down."
"A medic-nin never leaves a patient she is not sure is completely healed behind, and besides, we were already attacked once, so who's to say we won't be again?" Sakura was quick to say, frowning.
Kameko bit her lip as she followed. She was still a little dizzy, and her hearing wasn't the best even an hour and a half later, but she willing stumbled after Sakura. She'd do her best not to hold her teammates back this time.
I wish I could do that healing-chakra thing, she thought to herself as she and Sakura walked side-by-side. I haven't got the chakra control, though. If I did, I could help people. "Was it hard, learning how to be a medic-nin?" Kameko asked.
"Oh, was it ever!" Sakura breathed, eyes wide with remembered struggles. "But I was determined. I didn't want to be just Sakura anymore. I wanted to be useful."
I've never felt that way. "You seem really good at it," she answered. She'd never been healed by a medic-nin before, but it had been a fairly interesting experience.
Sakura smiled for her efforts, though. "I try," she said. "I was taught by Tsunade, and she can be really tough on you if you don't try your best."
"The best kind of teacher," Kameko said, musing. She'd learned more under Iruka's intolerant reign than she had under Tanaka's half-hearted guidance. "We're really far behind," she added, noting that the group wasn't anywhere to be seen on the road.
"I know the way, so it's okay. Its more important not to push you -- even with my healing, you should be resting."
Kameko sighed, shaking her head. "On my first mission, and I'm already hindering the group," she said wryly.
"Don't feel bad -- you just became a genin a day ago, and I think this is definitely a job for a more experienced team. Something odd is going on with those guards. We should wait to talk about it, though."
"Mm'kay," she sighed. She was starting to feel extremely tired.
--
They ended up only catching up to the group when they made it to the village with the inn. Sakura bullied Kameko into bed and made her drink tea and eat a rice mush. Kameko was red-faced with horrified embarrassment before Sakura was finished pestering her.
"Kakashi-san?" she called, frowning slightly as she ate the gruel. She didn't know what else to call him, as she wasn't her teacher.
"Hmm?" he hummed, nose buried in his orange book. Kameko had already been informed by Naruto that it was a no-good dirty pervert's book.
"Kakashi-san," she repeated for good measure. "One of the guards -- he was aiming for me."
"Oh?” Kakashi said with that same bland disinterest. "Is that so?"
She frowned. She never knew when he was sounding that way because he already knew or if he didn’t believe her. “I know when people aim at me,” she insisted. It had been part of her training, after all, since Kanaye had always seemed so intent on killing her. “There was no way he was trying to get someone behind me. It wasn’t a panicked swing either -- that was on purpose.”
“Hn. Okay.”
Kameko stared at him for a moment longer before she returned sulkily to her rice-gruel. Sasuke was brooding in a corner, eyes fixed on the window while Naruto was bugging Sakura. Kameko ate as much of the slop as she could endure before she set is aside and the bowl was swept away by Sakura. “Hey," she called to Naruto, and was gratified when he ambled over. "Did he hear me? I mean -- Hear-me-hear-me?" she asked, referring to Kakashi.
Naruto grinned at her. “Kakashi-sensei is creepy, but he‘s a good nin. He probably saw it, Kameko-chan.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, feeling embarrassed. Well, that explained his boredom with her. She paused for a moment. “I don’t like what that means,” she said.
“Eh? But having a good nin as leader is a really good idea!” Naruto exclaimed, blinking at her.
“I mean that guard,” she said. “He was trying for me. Did any of you get attacked?”
“You and Kakashi-sensei were the only ones who got hit by that jutsu,” he said, shrugging.. There was a pause as the door opened and Sakura came in. “You were the only ones that looked like you should.”
“If the guards were going after us,” Sakura said, piping up. “They wouldn’t be able to know which guards were us.”
“Hey, what did that jutsu do to you, anyway?” Naruto asked, frowning until his eyes scrunched shut and gave him a strange appearance.
Kameko shrugged. “It felt weird. I got all nauseous and then vertigo started in. It didn’t last long, and there didn’t seem to be any after affects beyond mild hemorrhaging, but the henge was completely destroyed." She paused for a moment. “Of course, it wasn’t a direct hit. I’d hate to see what a direct hit could do,” she said, idly rubbing her stomach. She didn’t know what kind of affect it would have on her if the Sune-Kosuri was released. The poor spirit would probably be ecstatic to be free and take off to torment some people, but where that would leave her was distressing. The most common way to unseal demons was to destroy the container.
"Mild hemorrhaging," Sakura echoed with a deceptively mild voice. "Kameko-chan, that mild hemorrhaging would have killed you in another fifteen minutes."
She paled to hear that, and there was mild confusion as Naruto decided that was ample reason to have another fit of dramatics. "I didn't know it was that bad," she insisted. "It wasn't a direct hit."
"Hmm, I was closer to the detonation spot than Kameko was," Kakashi put in, though it seemed like he was remarking about the weather for all the emotion he put in it.
"Why would it affect her more than it affected you?" Sakura wondered.
"That's what I want to know!" Naruto said, pouting. "What did Kakashi do that disabled it? If we could find a counter-measure this quickly --"
"It won't work like that," Sasuke's bitter voice cut in. "Kakashi's chakra was just as chaotic as hers."
Though differently, went unsaid, but Kameko heard it. Sasuke had been able to note her chakra. She felt a chill. Sasuke had noticed, and Kakashi had noticed, and what else was there left to her? She'd never been shunned or really treated much different for her demon, but it wasn't something she wanted people she didn't know to find out about. There was no way she could know how they'd react. She'd learned after one incident from a missing-nin that had come to join them that letting it be known about the Sune-Kosuri could be the last thing she wanted to do.
"Eeeeh? Well, then, what now?" Naruto demanded.
"Now we continue the mission and report to Tsunade after it's over," Kakashi said, and turned a page in his book.
Kameko almost brought up the fact of the guard again, a little angry that he'd dismissed both it and what it could mean. When her eyes focused on him, though, she stopped. Kakashi is smart -- he knows things, she reminded herself. He is the mission leader, and he knows what he's doing. So instead, she leaned back into the bed and folded her hands across her lap, closing her eyes.
She wasn't sure if she would be able to sleep.
-- To Be Continued --
No informationing because I am lazy, and I don't think anything in this chapter requires it.